Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolffis an American short story writer, memoirist, and novelist. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Lifeand In Pharaoh's Army. He has written two novels, including The Barracks Thief, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and an array of short stories. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 June 1945
CityBirmingham, AL
CountryUnited States of America
The human heart is a dark forest.
But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.
Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.
Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.
There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.
Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity - its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.
One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.
Want! You must want something. What do you want?
You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
I was giving up--being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.